BEIJING — When the Chinese author Yan Lianke published in 2004 his prize-winning novel "Enjoyment," a satire about the wealth-creation schemes of corrupt village officials, he was approached by publishers from Japan, France, Italy and Britain eager to buy the foreign language rights.

Two-and-a-half years later, he still hasn't landed a foreign edition. The French and Japanese versions are stalled by the story's "structural difficulties," while the interest of the Italian and British publishers has waned over translation difficulties.

Yan's experience highlights a problem facing Chinese publishers: at a time when China hungers for greater cultural recognition - especially in the West - problems with translation, mind-set and freedom of expression hamper the spread of Chinese literature overseas.

Yan beat the odds just by attracting foreign interest. During the decade after 1995, according to government reports, China exported one title for every 10 imported. This year that ratio improved to around 7:1. But for a people proud of their long literary tradition, that's still a huge gap.

One problem is poor quality translations, experts say. "The Chinese language is very different from Western languages," said Shi Tao, publisher at the Chongqing Publishing Group in Beijing. "There hasn't been enough emphasis on good translations."

The few top translators, meanwhile, tend to have a backlog, including Howard Goldblatt, an American Sinologist with 40 translations to his credit. Goldblatt, who is in his mid-60s and is a part-time professor of Chinese literature at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, recently completed translating Su Tong's "Bi Nu" (whose working title is "Myth of Meng") and is now working on "Wolf Totem," which is set for publication in 2007. He also is committed to translating two novels for HarperCollins by 2008.

The time and complexity involved in rendering a subtle, accurate literary translation has discouraged foreign publishers. Some even translate works from one European language into another, bypassing the original Chinese, a "ridiculous" solution, said Michael Kahn-Ackermann, regional director at Germany's Goethe Institute in Beijing and a former translator.

A good translation can take years, but "many translators do it too quickly because they are underpaid," said Toby Eady, a long-time British literary agent and promoter of Chinese works, in an e-mail from London. Marie-Claude Cantournet, a French translator based in Eze, in the southeast of France, said in an e-mail interview that she earned as little as €19 - about $24.30 - per page for translating a detective novel by He Jiahong. English-language translators are often paid $5,000 to $10,000 for a project taking a year.

"Many companies will simply not have the patience or be able to envisage the financial rewards at the end of the process," Daniel Watts, managing director of Pan Macmillan Asia, which recently established the Picador Asia line dedicated to Asia-Pacific titles, said in an e-mail interview from Hong Kong.

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Others, such as Jo Lusby, the general manager for Penguin Group in China, see a mind-set problem, citing a resistance among British and American readers to foreign literature.

Only 167 of the top 5,000 bestsellers in Britain since 1998 were translated from another language, according to Nielsen BookScan, a monitoring and analysis service, and none of the top 20 titles were of Asian origin. A similar imbalance is seen in the United States and in other European markets.

But China doesn't always put its best foot forward, either. Books are often poorly edited. And authors facing censorship over topics, treatment of social issues and "correct interpretations" of history don't always produce the best fiction.

"There are still too many taboos in China," said Patrizia van Daalen, a copyright manager at Alpha Books, a branch of the Chongqing Publishing Group. "When you take sex, religion and politics out of the books, there's not much left in the literature that's titillating," she said.

There are signs of slow but steady change, however, industry experts say, as China's reputation and economy surge in advance of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. The decision to award the 2000 Nobel Prize in Literature to Gao Xingjian, the author of "Soul Mountain," put Chinese literature on the map.

And last year Penguin agreed to spend a record $100,000 for the English-language rights to Jiang Rong's hugely successful novel "Wolf Totem" - a combination autobiography, legend and ethnological observations of the Mongolian people and the conflicting feelings they have toward wolves.

Publishers of various nationalities also noted more China buzz at last month's Frankfurt Book Fair - the world's largest and a Mecca for publishers. Van Daalen said she was approached by at least 10 Western publishers interested in Chinese books, a marked change from past years.

HarperCollins also announced during the fair that it would publish three Chinese novels with The People's Literature Publishing House - Zhang Wei's "Ships of Old," Shen Congwen's "Border Town" and Lao She's "Rickshaw Boy," which turned heads there.

Add it all up, industry experts said, and the outlook is bright. "We're just on the cusp of a new trend," said Watts with Pan Macmillian. "I wholly anticipate many new translations to start appearing in the West in the coming years."